ACLU: Public Enemy No. 1

OK, stay with me. I know it’s a startling title, but I intend to validate it and its assertion here. So do stay with me, please.

I’ve been home a week since partial knee replacement surgery in Chicago barely a week ago. Both the surgery and the therapy are making me very optimistic about my return to the tennis and basketball courts. But meanwhile, I’ve had unusual time to read my voluminous mail, watch the news, and do some reflective thinking.

And two, it’s not accidental. It’s not just “happening.” Somebody’s got it in for us, and doesn’t intend to stop until we are no longer the America we’ve been for 250 years. We have a dedicated, resourceful, cunning, and well-funded enemy. And I’m not talking about al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden.

Right now our country is reeling from yet another senseless and demonic massacre in a public place, a mall in Omaha, committed by a disturbed, angry young man who said he wanted to “go out in style.” This, too soon after the college massacre at Virginia Tech, committed by a disturbed, angry young man, also determined to go out in a blaze of mayhem, taking as many innocent, unsuspecting students with him as possible.

The crazed shootings from the car trunk in Baltimore, the Columbine High School corridors near Denver by two more cold-blooded teens, and several “copy cat” scenes after that, all sicken us. Likewise, kids taking guns to school, intending to shoot their fellow grade schoolers as they ran on to the playground at recess.

We are enduring some 14,000 murders a year, across the country and in our cities — four times as many casualties as our military has suffered in the Iraq war!

Not everybody knows it yet, but there’s hardly a city or town in the United States that isn’t infested with gangs, composed of our own kids, armed with various weapons and marking and defending their “turfs,” often using and selling drugs and intimidating the kids who don’t want to be involved. Meanwhile, latest authoritative polls inform us that with each passing year fewer and fewer American kids are involved in any church or religion. Their parents still belong, but their children are opting out.

Why? Is there a connection? If so, what is it?

If I asked every reader who our Public Enemy No. 1 might be, I’ll bet the top answer would be the drug dealers, both those who flood our country from without, and those who make the drugs everywhere available within our borders. After all, they accomplish three heinous and devastating things:

1. They enable and reward illegal and immoral behavior, especially among the young and impressionable.

2. They eat away at the mental, moral, and physical health of millions.

3. And they pervert, undermine, and tear apart the fabric of society, starting with families, then schools, then communities and institutions, mocking laws and traditions and normal human behavior.

Pretty logical candidate, of course. But there’s another enemy that is managing all those things and has been since before there was a serious, widespread drug epidemic . . . an enemy that is quite consciously hitting at a deeper and even more devastating level — our spiritual heritage.

My nomination for Public Enemy No. 1 is an organization, founded in 1920 by atheistic, socialistic, elitist Roger Baldwin, an organization of legally trained men and women who will be found defending, even promoting the immoral or counter-traditional side of virtually every issue in our society.

My nomination goes to the ACLU.

Yes, I know they call themselves “defenders of civil liberties.” But whose liberties are they defending? Certainly not those of 95 percent of America’s citizens. In obvious fact, they are effectively throttling the free expression and long held traditions of most our citizens — in order to promote the often sordid preferences of tiny, selfish minorities!

Take your pick of issues: abortion, same sex “marriage,” “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance, even “In God We Trust” and “One Nation Under God,” pedophilia on the Internet, voluntary majority-wished prayer in school, exhibition of any and all religious symbols on public property, vile obscenity on our airwaves and internet, homosexual Scout leaders — any of scores of crucial, value-related issues. Whatever most Americans, by overwhelming majority, want, the ACLU opposes, and incessantly. Whatever most Americans, again by huge majority, oppose, the ACLU champions, with battalions of attorneys and millions in funds, much of it snared from taxpayers themselves!

Am I the only one that sees the connection between the ACLU’s scourging of all spiritual tradition and guidelines and the rising tide of insane violence, rampant drug usage, continued spread of fatal disease through irresponsible behavior, greed, and scams and broken marriages, teen pregnancies and public glorification of every kind of immorality?

Isn’t it obvious that, if you deny the existence of God, you remove the only real barrier to all these things? Why shouldn’t an alienated, disillusioned teen kill himself and others, if life is a cosmic accident and there’s no one to answer to?

As it happens, I’m not the only one struck by the connection between our history and our future, our cherished traditions and our character.

Writing in the Oct. 5 issue of U.S. News & World Report, Editor-in-Chief Mort Zuckerman stated it emphatically: “The stable family of two biological parents — surprise, surprise! — turns out to be the ideal vessel for molding character, for nurturing, for inculcating values, and for planning for a child’s future. By comparison, the children of single parents or broken families do worse at school and in their careers. Marriage, or the lack of it, is the best single predictor of poverty, greater even than race or unemployment.”

And Mr. Zuckerman concluded, “Public policy should not contribute to an a la carte menu of sex, love, and childbearing. It should emphasize the benefits for all from the package deal of marriage.”

Indeed.

And amen. You cannot hack away at the very foundations of a society, the pillars of integrity and responsibility that built it, and expect it to endure. It will inevitably tumble in on itself, in ruin and sorrow, as ours indeed may if the ACLU continues its unchecked campaign. It’s extremely important that the enemy be identified, and confronted.

OK, stay with me.I know it’s a startling title, but I intend to validate it and its assertion here.So do stay with me, please.I’ve been home a week since partial knee replacement surgery in Chicago barely a week ago.Both the surgery and the therapy are making me very...